Care of Wooden Floors by Will Wiles

Care of Wooden Floors is about a man who goes to stay in his friend’s flat while he is away in America. The flat is in an unknown country in Eastern Europe. The narrator’s friend, Oskar, is a bit fussy when it comes to being tidy and everything being in its rightful place. Oskar has left helpful notes around the flat suggesting things the narrator might do, go to a concert, and instructions on when and how much to feed the cats. A fact he emphasises is that the wooden floors in his flat are very expensive, so the narrator must try to keep the in the state in which he found them. Clean. As you can probably guess – chaos ensues.

The reader never learns the name of the narrator of the book and I’m not sure why that is. There is no reason for him to be anonymous. The only thing I can think of is that Wiles is trying to make the flat the main character rather than the narrator. However, this is speculation and only come to me having reached the end of the book. The unknown location sort of makes sense because someone from that place will inevitably read it and find something wrong with the description. But why not make a name up? I thought the air of mystery was a bit over-dramatic.

Wiles has quite a flowery style of writing. Not everything needs to be a simile or a metaphor or even both. Wiles didn’t seem to get this memo. Probably half of the descriptions are unnecessary. The book isn’t that long anyway but you could definitely lose a few pages. It distracts you from the story because once you’ve read this long description you then have to remember what happened before that. Although, to be fair, not a lot happens. You can’t help but think he’s just been on a creative writing course and tried a bit too hard to get it exactly right.

This is supposed to be a funny book. I didn’t find anything funny in the book. I can see where he was trying to be funny by causing unfortunate things to happen but that’s not the kind of thing I find funny. Also, slapstick is very difficult to write, being such a visual form. Maybe some nice word play or something would have been better. Comedy is a difficult genre to write and this book shows this. On the other hand, if it’s not supposed to be funny then I’m not really sure what was going on. It’s a little bit like Peep Show, so if you like that you may like this. However, for me neither book, nor Peep Show, are funny. They’re awkward.

The narrator of the book doesn’t seem like a particularly nice person. You don’t really learn an awful lot about him but he doesn’t seem to be very happy but at the same time doesn’t want to change that. He plans to do some writing while staying in the flat yet doesn’t do any. He spends the whole time drinking wine or being passed out from drinking wine. There are only so many times you can have this happen in a book before it gets boring. The book takes place over eight days. Perhaps six of those days he wakes up from having drunk too much. I didn’t find myself able to relate to this book at all.

Overall rating 2 out of 5.